Get Out!

The Natural World. That's a phrase I've always looked at slightly askance. Everything outdoors labeled and tucked away as something seperate, a place you go into. Somewhere else. When I was a child I would be gone, exploring my grandfathers farm and woods all day, sailing toy boats on the pond, building stick forts. Nowadays for much of America, fear keeps our children in sight at all times. We take them TO THE PARK, instead of just saying be back by suppertime. But for millions of Americans the reality is that they might spend days at a time where their feet never leave pavement and then only cutting across the grass instead of taking the sidewalk. The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health ( http://jech.bmj.com pretty interesting site BTW ) published a 2009 study which found that the closer you live to nature and "the Natural World" the better your chances of being healthy. The study looked at 345,143 Dutch people's medical records. (No idea why 345,143 but hey that's a huge sample group) The records were then compared with how much green space was located within 1 kilometer and 3 kilometers of a person's postal code. The results concluded that if you lived within within 1 kilometer of a park or other wooded area you suffered less anxiety and depression than those who lived farther away. Just being within three kilometers didn't seem to help much BTW. And according to the journal Environmental Science & Technology five minutes, YEP FIVE MINUTES, spent outdoors doing anything from walking to fishing will improve your mental health. Their website is http://pubs.acs.org/journal/esthag, go there and click on the online news sometime to see the stuff you cannot find anywhere else. Take the mad genius Edward Abbey's advice... " Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards." Turn off the d%#n TV. The next time your sitting at lunch and the topic of conversation is a TV show and you are a main participant in that conversation take that a warning sign. A serious sign as much as high blood pressure or a heart arrhythmia that something is terribly wrong. Just think if you took that same amount of time and learned just one thing about the real world around you. In a year would you understand the world around you more, could you tell a sassafras tree from an oak or will you have just seen every episode of NCIS? Which is most likely? I love creeks. I've spent an inordinate time around them, fishing the larger ones, scouting the surrounding hillsides for ginseng, or goldenseal, or mushrooms, checking out rockbars for fossils, the list goes on and on. And what have I learned from creeks? One shocking fact is that nobody goes anywhere around them anymore. And I mean nobody. I'll lace up the boots, throw a peanut butter sandwich and a couple bottles of water in my daypack and spend all day exploring one and never see another person. Right there just over your fence, down at the end of the field, just over the hill, lays another country, your local creek. Your more likely to go to some tropical island than here, and your not alone, I never ever see anyone. But I do see things. Small everyday miracles, crawfish crawling across the bottom, a doe slipping down for a drink, the twisted artistry of sycamore roots. And yes Ive been bitten by bugs, I've gotten sweaty, Ive been caught out in storms and soaked to the skin and froze. You know why? Because I was alive and doing something. You dont have any of that happen to you while your watching TV because YOUR NOT DOING ANYTHING! My theory is your not really alive watching Dancing with the Kardashians. Instead you have just set aside time you dont want to live bringing you that much closer to death. "Well she lived to be 80." No, there was an eighty year period between her death and birth, she lived hardly any at all... Mel Brooks oddly enough has one of the best quotes I've ever heard on the subject: "Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive."